native americans – Just the Tarot

Entropy, Coyote, The Tower Card, and That God Person

A brief exploration of why god didn’t make shit happen.

I have a lot of friends who are atheists. While I disagree with them (leaning more toward polytheism myself), I can’t blame them for feeling that way. When humans talk about god they tend to get plumb ridiculous.

It isn’t hard to imagine where the idea of god originated. We can visualize one of our very ancient ancestors standing beside a tree scratching his crotch when – KABLAM!!! – a giant bolt of lightning hits the tree and blows it into a million smoldering pieces. Being a thinking primate, our ancestors’ initial reaction was probably deeply profound. Something along the lines of, “HOLY SHIT! WHAT IN THE HELL WAS THAT???”

A little later, he probably tried to reason out exactly that question: “What in the hell was that?” He would have noticed, of course, that whatever IT was, IT had come from the sky. From up there, somewhere. Therefore, he would have arrived at his initial conclusion: there MUST be a, “somewhere,” up there. There must be some place up in the sky that the lightning monster came from. Just for ease of discussion, he thought, let’s call it, “heaven.”

So did the lightning monster fall out of heaven? Did it slip over the edge and tumble down to earth? No, he’d reason; upon consideration it was much more like it was THROWN from the heaven place because it hit really hard. As he turned this over in his brain cells, it would dawn upon him that if it had been thrown, then there must be someone up there in the heaven place who threw it. And when we throw something at someone, it’s usually because we’re pissed off. Therefore, the heaven person must have been pissed off at me, he thought, and he threw a lightning monster at me, but he missed me and hit the tree. Poor tree.

So just in the space of a few hours, he’d worked out that there was a place in the sky called heaven, that someone lived in it, and that he had a very bad temper that caused him to throw things at people he was pissed off with. And he decided that, just for ease of discussion, he’d call that heaven person, “god.”

Now, of course, the next step would be to figure out why god was pissed off and, logically, it must have had something to do with what our ancestor had been doing when the god person threw the lightning monster at him. And when he thought back on it, he realized that he’d been scratching his crotch. “Aha!” he thought. “The heaven person must not like crotches because . . . um . . . we use them for sex! That must be it!’

And just like that, he’d invented the concept of sin.

So we can see that our incredibly wise ancestor was able to come up with the notions of heaven, god, and sin, and deduce all of that from the presence of a lightning bolt that hit a tree. Brilliant, really.

There were a few flaws in his reasoning about god that would come back to haunt us. First of all, the god person seems to be a bit on the irrational side. Why wouldn’t he like crotches? They’re perfectly nice human apparatuses that make us feel really good, so what’s his problem with them? Especially as the idea that the god person actually MADE us evolved, it seemed more and more problematic that he wouldn’t like our genitals. If he didn’t like them that much, why didn’t he just make us with something else between our legs, like, I don’t know, a flower or an extra foot or something?

Second, we can see that god has a really bad temper. A really, really bad temper. If he didn’t like what we were doing, he could have just sent a nice angel with a handwritten note that said, “Hey, that’s really irritating, so knock it off.” But, no, he has to blow up a tree.

Third, we see that this god person is very strongly associated with bad things happening. If a tree blows up or there’s an earthquake or a flood or a tsunami, it’s because god is PISSED. It’s a punishment, presumably because we’ve been playing with our genitals again.

We can see that idea pretty clearly illustrated in the Tarot card called The Tower. Most of the Tower-Being-Hit-By-Lightning myths have to do with punishment for human hubris. Those idiots were trying to build a tower so high that it would reach to the heaven place and the god person got pissed and blew up the tower, just to show them that HE owned the heaven place and not them.

There’s actually a conundrum hidden in The Tower card that theologians have wrestled with for centuries. If god loves us, and god’s all powerful, why does all of this bad stuff keep happening to us? I mean, if he can control everything, why doesn’t he just make good stuff happen to us? Why is there cancer and fires and floods and why do terrible, terrible things happen to people?

The traditional answer goes right back to the idea that god is an extreme control freak with a really bad temper. He WANTS for good stuff to happen to us, but we keep doing the wrong things and so he HAS to make bad stuff happen to us. Because we’re crotch scratching sinners, doncha know?

Native Americans had a slight shift in that perspective that makes a major difference in how we view the world. They noticed that there is a factor in the universe which physicists would later label as, “entropy.” The definition for entropy is, “a lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.” Another way of putting it is that any organized system will start to disintegrate.

On a practical level, that means that just as soon as we get things arranged to our satisfaction, they start to fall apart. It’s like when we clean our houses and then a week later they’re a mess again. Entropy snuck up and bit us in the ass.

Native Americans built that into their theology and we might call it, “the shit happens,” principle. Yes, there are loving, benevolent gods who want our lives to go perfectly well and want us to be happy. But sometimes shit happens. And when it does, it’s because of the Trickster Gods, like Coyote and Raven. The benevolent gods are busy weaving a beautiful tapestry of life, but the trickster gods are over there in the corner unraveling it as fast as they can. They’re entropy and they’re making the system disintegrate.

On the one hand, this allows us to have loving, caring gods. On the other hand, it explains why shit happens. In this scenario, the lightning bolt that hit the tree our ancestor was standing next to would have been sent by Raven or Coyote. And they would have been laughing their asses off when they watched him jump.

That turn in their theology was actually a very important step. First of all, it acknowledges that shit happens. Second, it says that shit happens, JUST BECAUSE. It doesn’t necessarily have a damned thing to do with us or whether we’ve sinned or we’re scratching our crotches again. It just happens because entropy is a part of the fabric of the Universe. Coyote or Raven are always there, turning our orderly, sensible worlds upside down, JUST BECAUSE. So it gets rid of the concept of sin and we don’t have to feel guilty about our genitals anymore.

Most importantly, though, it gets rid of the nutso, bipolar, control freak, mean bastard that we’ve had running heaven. It’s not OUR fault that shit happens, but we also don’t have to invent a crazy god to explain it. No more vengeful patriarch who’s just itching to throw us into eternal flames. No more voyeuristic stalker who’s counting how many times we masturbate so he can punish us for it. No more crazed Jehovah demanding that Abraham shove a knife into his son’s chest to prove how much he loves god.

And, all in all, the heaven place is much nicer without him.

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

Happiness, Capitalists, Yellow Rocks, and Radical Meditators

Most people who are on a Spiritual Path eventually come to hold beliefs which conservatives consider, “politically radical.” It’s ironic, because most people who are on a Spiritual Path have very little interest in politics, except to casually observe it as another form of human insanity.

When I use the term, “radical,” I mean it in its original use from the latin word, “radix,” or root, as in, “the root of a plant.” To get radical is to get at the very root of something, to get to the place that it all grows out of, so to speak.

Let’s take the example of the Six of Pentacles. It shows a richly dressed man, scattering coins to beggars, and holding a scale so that he can measure exactly what he’s giving away.

You couldn’t ask for a better representation of the, “scarcity,” view of life that’s at the root of our society. There simply isn’t enough wealth to go around and some people have it and some people don’t. Those who DO have it, should share it with those who don’t have it, but they need to be very, very careful about not giving too much away, because there’s never really enough.

In real time, we see that happening with the gazillionaires who live in penthouses, fly around in private jets, take vacations on yachts, and are DESPERATELY WORRIED that poor people might be getting too many food stamps. Having enough to eat without working for it at minimum wage jobs is bad for their character, doncha know? Makes them lazy and dependent. Pass the champagne, darling . . .

As we move into a deeper level of spirituality, though, we begin to understand that there’s another model for looking at life, which is the, “abundance,” view. The Universe and Mother Earth seem to be richly, almost insanely, abundant. There are enough seeds in one tomato to plant an entire farm. There are enough sperm cells in one tablespoon of semen to repopulate the world. Women’s bodies produce far more eggs than they could ever bear as babies. And, yes, we could produce enough food to feed every hungry person in the world.

And we begin to realize that the problem isn’t that there isn’t enough, the problem is that some people are spiritually sick and want far more than their share of the abundance. Even worse, they want to be sure that other people have less than THEIR share, because they believe in their hearts that wealth is scarce and if they have more wealth, they’re better than other people.

Eckhart Tolle talks about this quite a bit in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (Oprah’s Book Club, Selection 61) In a nutshell, the Ego always wants more STUFF, because the Ego believes that the more STUFF it has, the more important it is. And, as a part of that contrast, if you’ve got less stuff than I have, then I’m just that much more important! If I drive a BMW and you drive a Honda, I’m better than you. If you have a two hundred dollar computer and mine cost five thousand, then I’m better than you. If I live in a McMansion and you live in a trailer, then I’m better than you.

And so we get hypnotized into this weird dance of thinking that our STUFF makes us, “better people.” But, as Tolle points out, it’s just a sugar rush, not real nutrition. Yes, the new computer (or car or house or jewelry) makes us happy for a while, but then it doesn’t anymore. So we have to buy more and more and more stuff to keep getting that rush, but somehow happiness keeps slipping away from us every time.

If we keep walking down the Spiritual Path we realize that the STUFF doesn’t really make us happy, not for long. As we continue to evolve, we start to get a glimpse of happiness WITHOUT the stuff. Maybe that revelation comes to us in our meditations or our dreams or journals, but we begin to get just a glimmer that the material stuff really has very little to do with happiness. We can actually BE HAPPY anytime that we want to and we don’t need a new computer to get there.

And that, my friends, is a RADICAL idea! That goes right to the root of our whole economic system and way of life. It short circuits the entire capitalist system which is based on consumers being convinced that they need to keep consuming STUFF in order to be happy. If we quit buying all of that crap that doesn’t really make us happy, then the gazillionaires who are selling us all of that crap that doesn’t really make us happy are going to lose a lot of money.

Dangerous, dangerous thinking! LOL – it really is. It’s why they killed Jesus. “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven.” WHAT???? Kill that guy! Quickly!

The point is that as we explore and grow spiritually, our values change and we become less and less in synch with society as whole. We realize that, ultimately, what all of us want is love and happiness. And we realize that love and happiness flow out of our hearts, not our possessions. Possessions and materialism itself start to feel like a form of insanity, which it can easily become.

Consider the example of the genocide committed against Native Tribes in the United States. We killed hundreds of thousands of Tribal Peoples in the Dakotas and Northern California because they were sitting on land that contained gold.

From their point of view, we were totally out of our minds because NO ONE HAD TOLD THEM THAT GOLD ISN’T JUST A ROCK. Why kill someone over a rock? Which, by the way, it IS just a rock. You can’t eat it. You can’t fertilize your fields with it. You can’t make clothing out of it. Other than being pretty, gold is totally useless.

Except that somewhere, thousands of years ago, some asshole said, “I have this pretty yellow rock and you don’t, so I’m better than you.” Since that original asshole, wars have been fought, untold numbers of people have been tortured and killed, and whole civilizations have been decimated, all because some people wanted to have ALL of the pretty, yellow rocks.

It really is monumentally nuts, when you think about it.

It’s my fervent hope that, as we move out of the ego-based scarcity model and into the new spiritual paradigm, we’ll see materialism begin to wither on the vine. Contrary to their paranoia, that doesn’t mean we need to have a revolution and take all of the rich people’s stuff away from them. There’s plenty to go around and if their yellow rocks make them feel better, so be it.

That’s abundance.

That’s radical.

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Donald Trump, Pharaohs, and the Peculiar Royalty Cards of the Tarot

\If you’ve ever studied the Tarot you know that the definitions for the royalty cards in the Minor Arcana pretty much suck. For every suit of cards – wands, cups, swords, and pentacles – there are corresponding royal figures: the Page, Knight, Queen, and King. The definitions for these come about as close as any of the cards to the stereotypes of Gypsy fortune tellers muttering that you’re about to meet a tall, dark stranger.

Unlike the definitions for all of the rest of the cards, these tend to be very gender and age specific. As in, “An older, dark haired man with a hatchet face will play an important role in your life.” Or, “A troubled young person with red hair may cause mischief.” Or, “A very strong, dark haired, materialistic woman will be difficult to defeat in legal problems.”

Perhaps the definitions are so awful because the very concept of royalty is so NOT the Tarot. The Tarot is not about, “exceptionalism,” or people who are removed from the normal human experience by virtue of their wealth or power.

The Minor Arcana cards describe common human experiences and states of being that we all go through. Poverty, disappointment, broken hearts, celebrations, love, hate, passion. The Major Arcana describe archetypes that blow through all of our lives. Illumination, spiritual quests, death, lovers, evil, power, sudden turns of fortune.

In a word, the Tarot is, “egalitarian.” Egalitarianism is, in its original meaning, the doctrine that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities. We see that built into the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Of course, we know that the people who signed that document were, for the most part, rich white dudes who owned slaves and would have been horrified at the possibility of women voting. Nonetheless, let’s look at the truth that underlies the statements that they didn’t live up to.

We are ALL of us much more alike than we are different. If you take it right down to the core, right down to the bedrock of existence, we are ALL Souls on the earth plane trying to do our best and figure out why in the hell we’re here and what we’re supposed to do next. Just forget for a moment all of the strange earth plane illusions of skin color, gender, countries, languages, creeds and religions, wealth, poverty, genius and stupidity. Underneath the whole, bizarre, flashy, Mardi Gras parade of colorful costumes and masks, we’re Souls on a common journey. On the Soul level, we are all equals.

Which is why the Tarot works for everyone. It’s about that bedrock of human experiences that every person on the planet shares in common. It’s about what we – ALL OF US – encounter in our lives.

Being a King or a Queen, a Knight or a Page . . . except metaphorically and momentarily, those are NOT experiences which most of us will share. And so those cards seem like rather odd appendages to the Tarot as a whole.

Karl Popper, who was one of the most prominent philosophers of the 20th century, once wrote an essay called, “Is There Meaning in History?” And the first sentence in his essay was, “No.”

His point was that history is mainly about the egomaniacs, killers, misfits, and psychotics who seized power, created thrones, and caused endless misery for their fellow Souls, and NOT about the majority of people who were living during their periods of time. The French, for instance, are fond of remembering the, “military genius,” of Napolean while ignoring the millions of deaths that the little over-compensated dictator caused.

Americans love to talk about their cowboys but not so much about the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Native Americans to make room for the cowboys.

The real story of the pyramids should be about the slaves and artisans who built them. Instead, we remember them by the tricked out, inbred Pharaohs whose bodies they contained.

On the current scene, Donald Trump is an extremely wealthy man who has taken over control of the world’s most powerful office. He, not us, will be remembered in the history books. But on a Soul level, he’s a rather pathetic old man who’s stuck in his first and second chakras, whose own mother didn’t like to touch him, who’s had a series of mail order wives he’s cheated on, who never had a pet and who, as near as we can tell, has never been loved by another human being. Pretty sad.

In all probability, decent definitions for the royalty cards in the Tarot won’t emerge until we give up our fascination with and admiration for royalty and the ultra-wealthy.

At that point the definition for the King of Pentacles may be, “A totally materialistic, shallow soul who is obsessed with money to a point of crushing anyone in his path.”

And the Queen of Cups might be, “A pathologically jealous bitch who will destroy anyone she views as a potential rival.”

And the Knight of Wands might be, “An intellectual zealot who will ride right over anyone who disagrees with his elitist, fanatical point of view.”

It’s just a matter of looking at the real Kings, Queens, Knights, and Pages in, “history,” and seeing how they really behaved. What human qualities do the royalty cards really represent? What kind of a person was Henry the Eighth? Was the Sun King all that sunny? How horrible were most of these people?

We may have to create a special card to represent Trump, though. Maybe the King of Putz? I’m open to suggestions . . .

The World Tarot Card

A semi-nude woman, who seems almost to be dancing, is in the center of the card. She holds a wand in each hand and is partially draped with a blue cloth. She is surrounded by an oval laurel wreath bound with red and purple cloth. In the corners of the card are an angel, an eagle, a bull and a lion, representing Aquarius, Scorpio, Taurus, and Leo, the four fixed signs of the zodiac.

This is a card about balance, completion, honor, and rebirth. A project is coming to a very satisfactory ending. The questioner has worked hard, overcome many obstacles, and is now being rewarded with great success.

The woman holds a wand in each hand, indicating that she has integrated the feminine and the masculine and is in control of all of the elements in her life. She is balanced and in harmony. Moreover, she is surrounded by the fixed signs of the zodiac indicating that she is stable and grounded.

The laurel wreath indicates that the questioner will receive honors of some kind for his or her efforts. Perhaps a promotion or a bonus. Perhaps public recognition.

There is also the element of rebirth. The laurel wreath is very much in the shape of the birth canal and this indicates that the questioner is emerging into a new world or about to start a new project, strengthened and reinforced by his or her past experiences.

On a mundane level, this may indicate the completion of a successful pregnancy or extended travel.

REVERSED: The questioner is this close to finishing a project but has run off of the tracks for some reason. Shows a lack of focus on the final goal and perhaps someone who has lost herself in the minutiae of a project and is not seeing the overall picture.

A Little More About The World:

There are people who believe that the Major Arcana of the Tarot contain some sort of a secret doctrine, a hidden path to wisdom that can be discerned by those who have the occult knowledge necessary to understand it. I see very little evidence for that.

I think of the Tarot as less of a path and more of a mirror. The Major Arcana show us the large, archetypal forces that are operating in our lives at any given moment. All of us experience those forces at one time or another. We all feel the child-like joy of The Fool, the sense of mastery and control of The Magician, the luxuriant contentment of The Empress. We all experience the mourning and loss of Death, the sudden reversals of luck that are signified by The Wheel of Fortune. Certainly since 911 The Tower is seared into our psyches.

These are forces that move through our lives, that shape us, help us to grow and evolve and sometimes defeat us. To say that there is a path in the cards is somewhat simplistic, I think. Rather, the path is in ourselves, in our own individual dharma, and the events and forces that the cards portray help us to define that path.

I’m in the third act of my life now and so I have the luxury of hindsight. Not to disparage the Wisdom of Forrest Gump, but life really isn’t like a box of chocolates. Unless some of the chocolates are laced with arsenic.

Life is a lot more like a mountain river, sometimes wild and out of control and then spreading into a serene meadow before plunging into the next set of rapids. As we go along we sometimes get dumped into the chilly water and have to fight our way back into the raft. And sometimes we can just sit there and float, enjoying the scenery and grooving on the serenity.

One way or another, though, we are always moving forward, from beginning to end of each incarnation. And one way or another we learn a lot about how to navigate the river, how to get through the rough waters and how to savor the calm.

The World is the last card in the Tarot deck but it isn’t about the end of the journey. It’s a pause in the journey, like pulling into a peaceful, quiet cove to rest and assess what we’ve been through. It’s the full realization of all of the skills that we’ve gained in following our paths and the confidence we can feel in using those skills in the future. We’ve been through the mill and we’ve come out the other side stronger, wiser, and more capable. We’ve integrated the lessons that The World teaches and they’re a part of us now. No one can ever take that away.

To quote the Beatles: “Life goes on within you and without you.”